H-O-R-G-Y

I just watched (for the third time) Damian Pettigrew’s wonderful documentary Fellini: I’m a Born Liar. This is a fascinating glimpse into one of the most creative minds of the 20th century. Apparently Pettigrew published a transcript of his interviews that captures all of Fellini’s marvelous quotes, eg, “I am interested in everything…I believe in everything. I think it is much easier that way.”  Terrance Stamp has aged very well, and is even more appealing now than he was in The Collector. His recounting of Fellini directing him in Toby Dammit (part of The Spirits of the Dead trilogy) is absolutely riveting. Looking at the clips from his older movies brought back a lot of memories of staying up late, way past my bedtime, watching foreign films on channel 9 or 11. What jumps out is how badly dubbed they were in Italian and in English. The audio rarely syncs up with what their mouths are saying, and there are an improbable amount  of “oohs and ahs” in many of his films that sound much the same as other sorts of exclamations that I remember hearing in Divorce Italian Style and other Italian films from the early 1960’s. Now I want to see another one of his documentaries, Balthus, Through the Looking Glass.